2011/08/15

Password management with TrueCrypt and Dropbox

Maintaining passwords for multiple servers across multiple development environments
is a pain. A few weeks back there was a downed service on one of my servers and I
was at a computer without my passwords and hosts files. The debugging session
that followed required hopping through multiple servers and in general took a
lot longer than it should.

I decided to use DropBox and TrueCrypt to setup a secure password file that was synchronized across all of my environments. The setup for both is dirt simple. I created a 10mb encrypted file called SAFEFILE in my Dropbox, then add a passwords.txt to it.

Then I evolved some code a friend threw my way for generating passwords. Creating a password and storing it directly in my passwords.txt file, and retrieving it is now a snap. The functions copy the password directly to the clipboard for easy pastin.

Adding my other dotfiles to my Dropbox and symlinking them to my home directory keeps me standard across any environment I use.